Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese

by Arthur Sze (Editor)

Arthur Sze has rare qualifications when it comes to translating Chinese: he is an award-winning poet who was raised in both languages. A second-generation Chinese-American, Sze has gathered over 70 poems by poets who have had a profound effect on Chinese culture, American poetics and Sze's own maturation as an artist. Also included is an informative insightful essay on the methods and processes involved in translating ideogrammic poetry.

MOONLIGHT NIGHT

by Tu Fu

can only look out alone at the moon.
From Ch'ang-an I pity my children
who cannot yet remember or understand.

Her hair is damp in the fragrant mist.
Her arms are cold in the clear light.
When will we lean beside the window
and the moon shine on our dried tears?

Sze's anthology features poets who have become literary icons to generations of Chinese readers and scholars. Included are the poems of the great, rarely translated female poet Li Ching Chao alongside the remorseful exile poems of Su Tung-p'o. This book will prove a necessary and insightful addition to the library of any reader of poetry in translation.

The poets include:
T'ao Ch'ien
Wang Han
Wang Wei
Li Po
Tu Fu
Po Chu-yi
Tu Mu
Li Shang-yin
Su Tung-p'o
Li Ch'ing-chao
Shen Chou
Chu Ta
Wen I-to
Yen Chen

Arthur Sze is the author of six previous books of poetry, including The Redshifting Web and Archipelago. He has received the Asian American Literary Award for his poetry and translation, a prestigious Lannan Literary Award, and was recently a finalist for the Leonore Marshall Poetry Prize. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

from A Painting of a Cat

Nan Ch'uan wanted to be reborn as a water buffalo,
but who did the body of the malicious cat become?
Black clouds and covering snow are alike.
It took thirty years for clouds to disperse, snow to melt.

-Pa-ta-shan-jen (1626-1705)

The Last Day

Water sobs and sobs in the bamboo pipe gutter.
Green tongues of banana leaves lick at the windowpanes.
The four sur

Genres: Poetry, China

156 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 2001

About the author

Arthur Sze (b. 1950 New York City) is a second-generation Chinese American poet.

Sze was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of eight books of poetry. His own poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, Manoa, The Paris Review, Field, The New Yorker, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish.

He was a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University, a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe.

He is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and a Western States Book Award for Translation.

Reviews

[Amorak Huey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Her hair is damp in the fragrant mist.
Her arms are cold in the clear light.
When will we lean beside the window
and the moon shine on our dried tears?


I know translation is an "impossible" task, and I have never forgotten the Italian phrase traduttori/traditori: "translators/traitors." Which translation does not in some way betray its original? In considering the process of my own translations, I am aware of loss and transformation, of destruction and renewal.

[Natalie (CuriousReader) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think I've read more than one or two Chinese poems in my life, but it seems ancient Chinese poetry really floats my boat. The vivid imagery, the themes of wine, the moon, human's relationship with nature, beauty, solitude, and more - really suits my taste and I found poets (especially Tao Chien) that I want to explore further. This book includes a sort of introduction in which Arthur Sze describes his translation process, which I found very valuable and interesting - he shows the process through one of the poems included in the collection, so that the reader gets a sense of his translation "style" if you will. Why he favours one word over another, or what is sacrificed to gain a certain flow in the writing. Translating language is a difficult task, and the more I think about this the more I find the impossibility in it both fascinating and frustrating. That's sort of beside the point, but the introduction is I think a good way for the reader to get a sense of Arthur Sze's voice in these translations. The actual choice of poets and poems included in the collection I thought was spot-on, very few poems had no impact on me. Most of them made me stop, transported me to another time and another place, deep in the woods or late in the night, gazing at the sky and the stars, musing with the rain as a backdrop. Some poems made me shiver, tingle, filled me with a longing to read it again and again.

The translation seems to have been done wonderfully. All of the poems have a good flow, have some sort of melody or rhyme without being distracting. It feels, for me at least, like he still kept much of the integrity of the original - but of course all of this is only speculation, as I have not read the original text or even read any other translations of the same. But as a reader of this particular collection, I never felt like it had been overworked, neither did I feel it was so true to the original it sacrificed the beauty and melody of it for an English reader. I am keen to read other translations to compare with this one.

The only complaint I have is that the majority of the poetry included here is what I would call classical poetry (year 1100 and earlier). The collection is ordered by a timeline, so that the oldest poetry is the beginning of the collection and the most recent at the end of the book. The ordering I liked - as it allowed the reader to see similarities and differences in Chinese poetry over time, in terms of trends and of course how history affected the poetry too. I think it would've been better to cut the collection off on year 1400 or so, because as we move closer to modern times fewer poets are included and so are supposed to "represent" I feel, too much. Also that they didn't fit in as well (especially the last two names, from the 20th century) both in terms of style and themes, with the rest of the collection that felt more cohesive. It wasn't that the later poetry wasn't interesting or beautiful though, just that it didn't fit in as well in this collection.

All in all, such a fantastic collection! I'm so glad I picked this up on a complete whim.

The orioles cry, then scatter,
leaving the last of the blossoms to decay.
I'm terribly alone in the deep court:
do not let the last of the red petals be swept away
but leave them for the dancing girls
to step on as they walk home.
- Li Yü, lines from "To the Tune of 'Joy in the Oriole's Flight'"

[Lenora Good · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most fascinating part of this book was the introduction. I usually find introductions to books of poetry to be dry and dull. This introduction was anything but. Sze shows us how he translated the poems from Chinese to English. The Biographical Notes on the writers, in the back of the book, are every bit as interesting as their poems, starting with T’ao Ch’ien (365-427), ending with Yen Chen (twentieth century).

The first poem, by T’ao Ch’ien is Drinking Wine. That sounds like the perfect way to begin this book. Quite literally, every line was a poem in itself and ends with these four lines. “I hang a jug of wine on a cold branch: / then stand back, and look again and again. / My life spins with dreams and illusions. / Why then be fastened to the world?”

Wang Han’s poem, Song of Liang-chou gives us these words of wisdom, “Since ancient times, / how many soldiers ever returned?” It’s nice to know war isn’t new, it’s sad to know we haven’t learned much since ancient times.

Li Shang-Yin gives us Untitled poems, somewhat longer than many in this book, “A candle only stops weeping / when its wick becomes ash.” The book begins to wind down with a poem by Wen I-To, Dead Water. This was one of my favorites with the closing lines, “And if the frogs can’t endure the utter solitude, / let the dead water burst into song.”

Yen Chen, a modern poet, closes the book out with Red Rain, the final stanza reads thus: “A droplet tints a bone. / A droplet tints a smiling face. / February rain, red rain / is silently spread on the South Yangtze.” Red Rain tells the story of rain falling through smoke in a village with a new plow blade, children running and playing, and everyone wants to plow the first furrow. The bone could be from last night’s supper, the smiling faces are the men looking at the plow, and the running, playing children who welcome the rain.

The one frustration I found, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Sze had the same frustration, were the poems written as songs to melodies I have no idea about, with a high probability of being lost to the passing of time.

Since most of us are fastened to this world, I highly recommend buying and reading this book, available as a paperback and an electronic version. These are poems to read individually and slowly. Place the book on your nightstand, and open at random, read before sleep. Thank you, Mr. Sze for giving us such a book.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Careful, very clear translations, and done for the best of reasons: to help a very good poet reconnect to his own work. Here Sze moves across the whole range of Chinese verse, from the well known T'ang poems through the centuries to the early 20th century, covering work that I, for one, didn't know. His short introduction to his process of translation is one of the clearest and most honest I have read. I will return to it. Perhaps I might have wanted a few more explanatory notes in a few places, ones that might explain the cultural references buried in the natural images, but I am always willing to go with the natural images in Chinese verse, even when I guess that I am missing things.

One of the added gifts of this little book was an expanded appreciation of what Pound did in his "Cathay" poems. For instance, we always hear, sometimes with a joking tone, about Pound using the notes by Fenellosa on Japanese translations of Chinese poems. So, we say (and I too, in my ignorance, have been guilty of this) that Pound created some lovely poems, maybe his loveliest, but that they bear very little relationship to the Chinese original. But Sze's version of that poem shows how things -- the story in things and some of the telling images -- survive all that transmission. Here is Pound's famous opening to "The River Merchant's Wife"

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse.
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plumes.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

And here's Arthur Sze's version of Li Po's "Song of Ch'ang-kan":

When my hair just began to cover my forehead,
I was plucking flowers, playing in front of the gate.
You came along riding a bamboo stick horse,
circling and throwing green plums.
Together we lived in Ch'ang-kan Village
never suspicious of our love.

Now as much as I admire the directness of the Sze version, I have to admit that the music of the Pound version is so much better. Or am I just reacting to the poem I have known from more than half a century? But, still, it is amazing that the Pound/Fenellosa/Japanese version has kept so much of the Chinese! It's really kind of wonderful, the story of this poem moving around in history and through languages!

[Bernie Gourley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let me begin with a note of clarification: The edition that I read was the “Silk Dragon II” collection, which is due out in May of 2024. I mention this because there is potential for confusion in that this book looks like a sequel (i.e. a completely new set of poems,) but really it is something between a new edition and a sequel. That is to say, while it has a substantial amount of new material, it is built on the original “Silk Dragon” volume. This edition adds eighteen new poem translations, most of which are from poets of the modern era (I mean that loosely, not technically, so 20th century onwards.) I’d recommend readers get this edition, but not both this and the original.

This collection includes a wide range of poems from ancient times through China’s various dynasties to the modern day. It includes translations that are extremely well-known, such as Li Bai’s “Drinking Alone with the Moon” and Liu Zongyuan’s “Snow on the River.” But it also includes many pieces that are likely to be new to most poetry readers, particularly given they will be reading translations (i.e. Non-specialists in Chinese poetry.) As mentioned, the bulk of the new poems are from recent decades and tend to be free verse. [Though there are four new classical poems, as well.]

I found the translations to be evocative and approachable. I am unable to comment on how well Sze captures the feel of the original, but I can say that the translations of poems I’m familiar with were at least on par with other translations that I’ve read. The translations don’t always display the sparseness one sees in classical Chinese poetry, but the challenge of conveying form and meaning and metaphor through translation is immense and, at some level, impossible.

I’d highly recommend this poetry collection for readers of poetry and translated literature.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arthur Sze is precisely the right person to edit an introduction to Chinese poetry, mostly classical but with a few forays into the 20th century. As the introduction to the collection makes clear, he understands and has thought deeply about the challenges of translating from a radically different tradition. He deftly negotiates the tensions between characters and the Roman alphabet and captures the feel of the masters (Tu Fu, Li Po, Wang Wei) as well as any versions I've read. It's a small collection, only about 70 pages of poems, but opens the path into deep engagements.

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are several reasons to admire these careful translations. First, the introduction respectfully builds a compact with readers and the original poets and the translator about the entry of one language expression into another and the energy Arthur Sze receives for his own poems. An insight into how it's done when so many considerations are in play. Then reading the poems with that introduction in mind makes each one seem even more precious and communicative. A gift.

[Chengru]

interesting curation

[Joannie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I really liked how the translator went through a detailed process of how he did each translation: however, I just didn't find them that convincing at times. He sacrifices the flow of the text for just the "right" imagery, and so it doesn't read smoothly and rhyme as much as he could have done so -- this takes away from the flow for my reading. Also, I would have preferred to have the actual Chinese characters next to each poem for reference, though the long introduction does introduce some characters. Still, a very nice read.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arthur Sze's The Silk Dragon weaves the world wide web of Chinese poetry into English translation with measures of restraint and subtlety. How to read and understand poems themselves as complexities and difficulties? Try the impossible, multitasking process of translating poetry.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some really excellent poems. I assume they are good translations, I compared a few with other translators and Sze's are outstanding. I would have been happier with more notes.

[Mills College Library]

895.11 S583 2001